Windows Azure is now Microsoft Azure aaaand…

Let’s start with prices!

we are cutting prices on compute by up to 35% and storage by up to 65% and reducing our Block Blob storage pricing by up to 65% for LRS and up to 44% for GRS, effective May 1.

On April 3, we have introduced General Purpose Instances called “Basic” that offers similar machine configurations as the “Standard” tier of instances offered today (Extra Small [A0] to Extra Large [A4]) without load balancing or auto-scaling features. These instances are well-suited for production applications that do not require the Azure load-balancer like development workloads, test servers and batch processing applications. These new instances cost up to 27% less than the corresponding instances in use today. See here for more information (starting April 3) Virtual Machines Pricing Details.

Sometimes I heard that Microsoft Azure is more expensive than Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is not true. Here a comparative table:

Enhancements in Microsoft Azure

Yesterday we unveiled several exciting updates to Microsoft Azure at the Build developer conference:

Preview of Microsoft Azure Portal: The new portal significantly simplifies resource management, integration with billing and a rich gallery of applications and services, built-in Visual Studio Online features. Now you can easily be more agile while maintaining control of your costs and application performance.

Open source partnerships with Chef and Puppet Labs: integrated in the portal

New Web Site options: Web Site Basic option with up to 3 virtual machine instances, and includes 10GB of storage and custom domains. Upgraded the existing Standard tier with 5-SNI and 1-IP SSL certificates, 50GB of storage and backup and restore features. The PaaS experience in Azure Web Sites now extends to Java—including pre-installed versions of the JRE as well as the ability to upload runtimes and containers. Traffic Manager too!

Azure SDK: SDK 2.3, you can now easily provision and create web sites or virtual machines in Azure and publish them with ease through the Publish Web wizard.

GA of Azure Active Directory Premium: you can now ensure secure access for users while giving them easy single sign-on to thousands of SaaS applications. With Azure Multi-Factor Authentication and machine learning based security and usage reports, you have the ability to prevent unauthorized access to both on-premises and cloud applications.